A Cheap, Portable Smartphone-Powered Ultrasound Machine

Toronto: Engineers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) have developed a new ultrasound transducer, or probe — no bigger than a Band-Aid — is portable, wearable and can be powered by a smartphone. It could dramatically lower the cost of ultrasound scanners to as little as $100. Conventional ultrasound scanners use piezoelectric crystals to create images of the inside of the body and send them to a computer to create sonograms. Researchers replaced the piezoelectric crystals with tiny vibrating drums made of polymer resin, called polyCMUTs (polymer capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers), which are cheaper to manufacture. “By using polymer resin, we were able to produce polyCMUTs in fewer fabrication steps, using a minimum amount of equipment, resulting in significant cost savings,” Gerardo added. (IANS)